The Deep End

How far will a mother stretch to shield her teen son from the fallout of a fatal brush with evil? School carpool mom Margaret Hall (art-house staple Tilda Swinton) barely blinks before plunging, in the name of family security and respectability, into the moral and statutory minefield of finding and then hiding a corpse. She wears a mask of stoic maternal resolve while dumping the body of her teen son’s (The Virgin Suicides’ Jonathan Tucker) older gay lover (Josh Lucas) into Lake Tahoe. Escalating confrontations with sleazy blackmailers (including ER’s Goran Visnjic) soon test her mettle. This lurid melodrama from San Francisco writer-director-producers Scott McGehee and David Siegel (Suture) is a riveting orgy of blue-hued metaphors that strains our suspension of disbelief at times. It is based on Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s 1940s novel The Blank Wall, which was filmed in 1949 by Max Ophuls as The Reckless Moment.